Computer systems and related technology affect many aspects of society. Indeed, the computer system's ability to process information has transformed the way we live and work. Computer systems now commonly perform a host of tasks (e.g., word processing, scheduling, accounting, etc.) that prior to the advent of the computer system were performed manually. More recently, computer systems have been coupled to one another and to other electronic devices to form both wired and wireless computer networks over which the computer systems and other electronic devices can transfer electronic data. As such, the performance of many computing tasks has become distributed across a number of different computer systems and/or a number of different computer environments.
For instance, data sets (e.g., databases, tables, and so forth) now often include terabytes of data. Accordingly, such data sets are generally stored in distributed fashion across a number of storage systems. Additionally, such large data sets have to be operated upon in similarly distributed fashion across a number of different computer systems. As such, enormous amounts of data relating to such data sets are generated, transferred, and shared each minute of each day. For example, data sets that are as big as 80 terabytes (or larger) may be consistently re-shuffled, or re-organized, based on a different key in response to particular requests. Although such operations may be simple, these same operations may be very expensive as massive amounts of data must be retrieved and operated upon from distributed computer systems. Accordingly, the large and distributed nature of these data sets suffer from numerous problems, including extreme network traffic congestion, resource usage, and execution time associated with any manipulation of these large data sets.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.